Psikometrik

Psikometrik adalah bidang yang berkaitan dengan teori dan teknik

dalam pengukuran pendidikan dan psikologis, mencakup pengukuran pengetahuan, kemampuan, sikap, dan
sifat kepribadian. Bidang ini terutama mempelajari perbedaan antar individu dan antar kelompok.
Penelitiannya terutama pada:

Pembuatan alat dan prosedur pengukuran, dan

Pengembangan dan penyempurnaan pendekatan teoretis terhadap pengukuran.

Kebanyakan dari kerja awal secara teoretis dan terapan dalam psikometrik dilakukan dalam upaya
mengukur kecerdasan. Konsep kunci tradisional dalam teori tes klasikal adalah reliabilitas dan validitas. Alat
ukur yang reliabel melakukan pengukuran dengan konsisten, sementara pengukuran yang valid adalah yang
mengukur apa yang akan diukur.
....................................................................
Psychometrics is a field of study concerned with the theory and technique ofpsychological measurement.
One part of the field is concerned with the objective measurement of skills and knowledge, abilities,
attitudes, personality traits, and educational achievement. For example, some psychometric researchers have,
thus far, concerned themselves with the construction and validation of assessment instruments such
as questionnaires, tests, raters' judgments, and personality tests. Another part of the field is concerned with
statistical research bearing on measurement theory (e.g., item response theory; intraclass correlation).
As a result of these focuses, psychometric research involves two major tasks: (i) the construction of
instruments; and (ii) the development of procedures for measurement. Practitioners are described as
psychometricians. All psychometricians usually possess a specific qualification, and while most
arepsychologists with advanced graduate training, many work for the government or in human
resources departments. Others specialize as learning and development professionals.
Historical foundation[edit]
Psychological testing has come from two streams of thought: one, from Darwin, Galton, and Cattell on the
measurement of individual differences, and the second, from Herbart, Weber, Fechner, and Wundt and their
psychophysical measurements of a similar construct. The second set of individuals and their research is what
has led to the development of experimental psychology, and standardized testing.[1]
Victorian stream[edit]
Charles Darwin was the inspiration behind Sir Francis Galton who led to the creation of psychometrics. In
1859, Darwin published his book "The Origin of Species", which pertained to individual differences in
animals. This book discussed how individual members in a species differ and how they possess
characteristics that are more adaptive and successful or less adaptive and less successful. Those who are
adaptive and successful are the ones that survive and give way to the next generation, who would be just as
or more adaptive and successful. This idea, studied previously in animals, led to Galton's interest and study
of human beings and how they differ one from another, and more importantly, how to measure those
differences.
Galton wrote a book entitled "Hereditary Genius" about different characteristics that people possess and how
those characteristics make them more "fit" than others. Today these differences, such as sensory and motor
functioning (reaction time, visual acuity, and physical strength) are important domains of scientific
psychology. Much of the early theoretical and applied work in psychometrics was undertaken in an attempt
to measure intelligence. Galton, often referred to as "the father of psychometrics," devised and included
mental tests among his anthropometric measures. James McKeen Cattell, who is considered a pioneer of
psychometrics went on to extend Galton's work. Cattell also coined the term mental test, and is responsible
for the research and knowledge which ultimately led to the development of modern tests. (Kaplan &
Saccuzzo, 2010)
German stream[edit]
The origin of psychometrics also has connections to the related field of psychophysics. Around the same
time that Darwin, Galton, and Cattell were making their discoveries, Herbart was also interested in
"unlocking the mysteries of human consciousness" through the scientific method. (Kaplan & Saccuzzo,
2010) Herbart was responsible for creating mathematical models of the mind, which were influential in
educational practices in years to come.

E.H. Weber built upon Herbart's work and tried to prove the existence of a psychological threshold, saying
that a minimum stimulus was necessary to activate a sensory system. After Weber, G.T. Fechner expanded
upon the knowledge he gleaned from Herbart and Weber, to devise the law that the strength of a sensation
grows as the logarithm of the stimulus intensity. A follower of Weber and Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt is
credited with founding the science of psychology. It is Wundt's influence that paved the way for others to
develop psychological testing.[1]
20th century[edit]
The psychometrician L. L. Thurstone, founder and first president of the Psychometric Society in 1936,
developed and applied a theoretical approach to measurement referred to as the law of comparative
judgment, an approach that has close connections to the psychophysical theory of Ernst Heinrich
Weber and Gustav Fechner. In addition, Spearman and Thurstone both made important contributions to the
theory and application of factor analysis, a statistical method developed and used extensively in
psychometrics.[citation needed] In the late 1950s, Leopold Szondi made an historical and epistemological
assessment of the impact of statistical thinking onto psychology during previous few decades: "in the last
decades, the specifically psychological thinking has been almost completely suppressed and removed, and
replaced by a statistical thinking. Precisely here we see the cancer of testology and testomania of today."[2]
More recently, psychometric theory has been applied in the measurement of personality, attitudes,
and beliefs, andacademic achievement. Measurement of these unobservable phenomena is difficult, and
much of the research and accumulated science in this discipline has been developed in an attempt to
properly define and quantify such phenomena. Critics, including practitioners in the physical
sciences and social activists, have argued that such definition and quantification is impossibly difficult, and
that such measurements are often misused, such as with psychometric personality tests used in employment
procedures:
"For example, an employer wanting someone for a role requiring consistent attention to repetitive detail will
probably not want to give that job to someone who is very creative and gets bored easily."[3]
Figures who made significant contributions to psychometrics include Karl Pearson, Henry F. Kaiser, Carl
Brigham, L. L. Thurstone, Georg Rasch, Eugene Galanter, Johnson O'Connor, Frederic M. Lord, Ledyard R
Tucker, Arthur Jensen, andDavid Andrich.
Definition of measurement in the social sciences[edit]
The definition of measurement in the social sciences has a long history. A currently widespread definition,
proposed byStanley Smith Stevens (1946), is that measurement is "the assignment of numerals to objects or
events according to some rule." This definition was introduced in the paper in which Stevens proposed
four levels of measurement. Although widely adopted, this definition differs in important respects from the
more classical definition of measurement adopted in the physical sciences, namely that scientific
measurement entails "the estimation or discovery of the ratio of some magnitude of a quantitative attribute
to a unit of the same attribute" (p. 358)[4]
Indeed, Stevens's definition of measurement was put forward in response to the British Ferguson Committee,
whose chair, A. Ferguson, was a physicist. The committee was appointed in 1932 by the British Association
for the Advancement of Science to investigate the possibility of quantitatively estimating sensory events.
Although its chair and other members were physicists, the committee also included several psychologists.
The committee's report highlighted the importance of the definition of measurement. While Stevens's
response was to propose a new definition, which has had considerable influence in the field, this was by no
means the only response to the report. Another, notably different, response was to accept the classical
definition, as reflected in the following statement:
Measurement in psychology and physics are in no sense different. Physicists can measure when they can
find the operations by which they may meet the necessary criteria; psychologists have but to do the same.
They need not worry about the mysterious differences between the meaning of measurement in the two
sciences. (Reese, 1943, p. 49)
These divergent responses are reflected in alternative approaches to measurement. For example, methods
based oncovariance matrices are typically employed on the premise that numbers, such as raw scores
derived from assessments, are measurements. Such approaches implicitly entail Stevens's definition of
measurement, which requires only that numbers are assigned according to some rule. The main research
task, then, is generally considered to be the discovery of associations between scores, and of factors posited
to underlie such associations.[citation needed]

On the other hand, when measurement models such as the Rasch model are employed, numbers are not
assigned based on a rule. Instead, in keeping with Reese's statement above, specific criteria for measurement
are stated, and the goal is to construct procedures or operations that provide data that meet the relevant
criteria. Measurements are estimated based on the models, and tests are conducted to ascertain whether the
relevant criteria have been met.[citation needed]
Instruments and procedures[edit]
The first[citation needed] psychometric instruments were designed to measure the concept of intelligence. One
historical approach involved the Stanford-Binet IQ test, developed originally by the French
psychologist Alfred Binet. Intelligence tests are useful tools for various purposes. An alternative conception
of intelligence is that cognitive capacities within individuals are a manifestation of a general component,
or general intelligence factor, as well as cognitive capacity specific to a given domain.[citation needed]
Psychometrics is applied widely[citation needed] in educational assessment to measure abilities in domains such
as reading, writing, and mathematics. The main approaches in applying tests in these domains have
been Classical Test Theory and the more recent Item Response Theory and Rasch measurement models.
These latter approaches permit joint scaling of persons and assessment items, which provides a basis for
mapping of developmental continua by allowing descriptions of the skills displayed at various points along a
continuum.[citation needed]
Another major focus in psychometrics has been on personality testing. There have been a range of
theoretical approaches to conceptualizing and measuring personality. Some of the better known instruments
include the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the Five-Factor Model (or "Big 5") and tools such
as Personality and Preference Inventory and theMyers-Briggs Type Indicator. Attitudes have also been
studied extensively using psychometric approaches.[citation needed] A common method in the measurement of
attitudes is the use of the Likert scale. An alternative method involves the application of unfolding
measurement models, the most general being the Hyperbolic Cosine Model (Andrich & Luo, 1993).[5]
Theoretical approaches[edit]
Psychometricians have developed a number of different measurement theories. These include classical test
theory (CTT) and item response theory (IRT).[6][7] An approach which seems mathematically to be similar to
IRT but also quite distinctive, in terms of its origins and features, is represented by the Rasch model for
measurement. The development of the Rasch model, and the broader class of models to which it belongs,
was explicitly founded on requirements of measurement in the physical sciences.[8]
Psychometricians have also developed methods for working with large matrices of correlations and
covariances. Techniques in this general tradition include: factor analysis,[9] a method of determining the
underlying dimensions of data;multidimensional scaling,[10] a method for finding a simple representation for
data with a large number of latent dimensions; and data clustering, an approach to finding objects that are
like each other. All these multivariate descriptive methods try to distill large amounts of data into simpler
structures. More recently, structural equation modeling[11] and path analysisrepresent more sophisticated
approaches to working with large covariance matrices. These methods allow statistically sophisticated
models to be fitted to data and tested to determine if they are adequate fits.
One of the main deficiencies in various factor analyses is a lack of consensus in cutting points for
determining the number of latent factors. A usual procedure is to stop factoring when eigenvalues drop
below one because the original sphere shrinks. The lack of the cutting points concerns other multivariate
methods, also.[citation needed]
Key concepts[edit]
Key concepts in classical test theory are reliability and validity. A reliable measure is one that measures a
construct consistently across time, individuals, and situations. A valid measure is one that measures what it
is intended to measure. Reliability is necessary, but not sufficient, for validity.
Both reliability and validity can be assessed statistically. Consistency over repeated measures of the same
test can be assessed with the Pearson correlation coefficient, and is often called test-retest reliability.
[12]
Similarly, the equivalence of different versions of the same measure can be indexed by a Pearson
correlation, and is called equivalent forms reliability or a similar term.[12]
Internal consistency, which addresses the homogeneity of a single test form, may be assessed by correlating
performance on two halves of a test, which is termed split-half reliability; the value of this Pearson productmoment correlation coefficientfor two half-tests is adjusted with the SpearmanBrown prediction formula to
correspond to the correlation between two full-length tests.[12] Perhaps the most commonly used index of
reliability is Cronbach's , which is equivalent to the mean of all possible split-half coefficients. Other

approaches include the intra-class correlation, which is the ratio of variance of measurements of a given
target to the variance of all targets.
There are a number of different forms of validity. Criterion-related validity can be assessed by correlating a
measure with a criterion measure theoretically expected to be related. When the criterion measure is
collected at the same time as the measure being validated the goal is to establish concurrent validity; when
the criterion is collected later the goal is to establish predictive validity. A measure has construct validity if it
is related to measures of other constructs as required by theory. Content validity is a demonstration that the
items of a test do an adequate job of covering the domain being measured. In a personnel selection example,
test content is based on a defined statement or set of statements of knowledge, skill, ability, or other
characteristics obtained from a job analysis.
Item response theory models the relationship between latent traits and responses to test items. Among other
advantages, IRT provides a basis for obtaining an estimate of the location of a test-taker on a given latent
trait as well as the standard error of measurement of that location. For example, a university student's
knowledge of history can be deduced from his or her score on a university test and then be compared
reliably with a high school student's knowledge deduced from a less difficult test. Scores derived by
classical test theory do not have this characteristic, and assessment of actual ability (rather than ability
relative to other test-takers) must be assessed by comparing scores to those of a "norm group" randomly
selected from the population. In fact, all measures derived from classical test theory are dependent on the
sample tested, while, in principle, those derived from item response theory are not.
Many psychometricians are also concerned with finding and eliminating test bias from their psychological
tests. Test bias is a form of systematic (i.e., non-random) error which leads to examinees from one
demographic group having an unwarranted advantage over examinees from another demographic group.
[13]
According to leading experts, test bias may cause differences in average scores across demographic
groups, but differences in group scores are not sufficient evidence that test bias is actually present because
the test could be measuring real differences among groups.[14][15]Psychometricians use sophisticated scientific
methods to search for test bias and eliminate it. Research shows that it is usually impossible for people
reading a test item to accurately determine whether it is biased or not.[16]
Standards of quality[edit]
The considerations of validity and reliability typically are viewed as essential elements for determining
the quality of any test. However, professional and practitioner associations frequently have placed these
concerns within broader contexts when developing standards and making overall judgments about the
quality of any test as a whole within a given context. A consideration of concern in many applied research
settings is whether or not the metric of a given psychological inventory is meaningful or arbitrary.[17]
Testing standards[edit]
In 2014, the American Educational Research Association (AERA), American Psychological Association
(APA), and National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) published a revision of the Standards
for Educational and Psychological Testing,[18] which describes standards for test development, evaluation,
and use. The Standards cover essential topics in testing including validity, reliability/errors of measurement,
and fairness in testing. The book also establishes standards related to testing operations including test design
and development, scores, scales, norms, score linking, cut scores, test administration, scoring, reporting,
score interpretation, test documentation, and rights and responsibilities of test takers and test users. Finally,
the Standards cover topics related to testing applications, including psychological testing and assessment,
workplace testing and credentialing, educational testing and assessment, and testing in program
evaluationand public policy.
Evaluation standards[edit]
In the field of evaluation, and in particular educational evaluation, the Joint Committee on Standards for
Educational Evaluation[19] has published three sets of standards for evaluations. The Personnel Evaluation
Standards[20] was published in 1988, The Program Evaluation Standards (2nd edition)[21] was published in
1994, and The Student Evaluation Standards[22] was published in 2003.
Each publication presents and elaborates a set of standards for use in a variety of educational settings. The
standards provide guidelines for designing, implementing, assessing and improving the identified form of
evaluation.[23] Each of the standards has been placed in one of four fundamental categories to promote
educational evaluations that are proper, useful, feasible, and accurate. In these sets of standards, validity and
reliability considerations are covered under the accuracy topic. For example, the student accuracy standards

help ensure that student evaluations will provide sound, accurate, and credible information about student
learning and performance.
Non-human: animals and machines[edit]
Psychometrics addresses human abilities, attitudes, traits and educational evolution. Notably, the study of
behavior, mental processes and abilities of non-human animals is usually addressed by comparative
psychology, or with a continuum between non-human animals and the rest of animals by evolutionary
psychology. Nonetheless there are some advocators for a more gradual transition between the approach
taken for humans and the approach taken for (non-human) animals.[24][25] [26] [27]
The evaluation of abilities, traits and learning evolution of machines has been mostly unrelated to the case of
humans and non-human animals, with specific approaches in the area of artificial intelligence. A more
integrated approach, under the name of universal psychometrics, has also been proposed.[28]
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Psikometri
Psikometrik adalah bidang studi yang berhubungan dengan teori dan teknik pengukuran pendidikan dan
pengukuran psikologis, yang mencakup pengukuran pengetahuan, kemampuan, sikap, dan sifat-sifat
kepribadian. lapangan terutama berkaitan dengan pembangunan dan validasi instrumen pengukuran, seperti
kuesioner, tes, dan penilaian kepribadian.
Ini melibatkan dua tugas penelitian utama, yaitu:
(i)
pembangunan instrumen dan prosedur untuk pengukuran, dan
(ii)
pengembangan dan penyempurnaan pendekatan teoretis untuk pengukuran. Mereka yang
psychometrics praktek dikenal sebagai psychometricians dan meskipun mereka mungkin juga psikolog
klinis, mereka tidak wajib begitu dan bukannya bisa (misalnya) sumber daya manusia atau pembelajaran dan
pengembangan profesional. Either way spesifik, terpisah, kualifikasi dalam psikometri diperlukan.
Asal-usul dan latar belakang
Banyak karya teoritis dan diterapkan pada awal psikometri dilakukan dalam upaya untuk mengukur
kecerdasan. Francis Galton, sering disebut sebagai "bapak psychometrics", dirancang dan termasuk tes
mental antara tindakan antropometri nya. Namun, asal psychometrics juga memiliki koneksi ke bidang
terkait psychophysics. Dua pionir lainnya psychometrics diperoleh doktor di Leipzig Psychophysics
Laboratorium bawah Wilhelm Wundt: James McKeen Cattell pada tahun 1886 dan Charles Spearman pada
tahun 1906.
psikometrkian LL Thurstone, pendiri dan presiden pertama Masyarakat Psikometri pada tahun 1936,
mengembangkan dan menerapkan pendekatan teoritis untuk pengukuran disebut sebagai hukum penilaian
perbandingan, sebuah pendekatan yang memiliki hubungan dekat dengan teori psikofisik dari Ernst Heinrich
Weber dan Gustav Fechner . Selain itu, Spearman dan Thurstone keduanya membuat kontribusi penting
kepada teori dan penerapan analisis faktor, metode statistik dikembangkan dan digunakan secara luas di
psikometri.
Baru-baru ini, teori psikometri telah diterapkan dalam pengukuran kepribadian, sikap, dan keyakinan, dan
prestasi akademik. Pengukuran fenomena ini tidak teramati sulit, dan banyak penelitian dan ilmu
pengetahuan akumulasi dalam disiplin ini telah dikembangkan dalam upaya untuk benar mendefinisikan dan
mengukur fenomena tersebut. Kritik, termasuk praktisi dalam ilmu fisika dan aktivis sosial, berpendapat
bahwa definisi tersebut dan kuantifikasi adalah mustahil sulit, dan bahwa pengukuran tersebut seringkali
disalahgunakan, seperti dengan tes kepribadian psikometri yang digunakan dalam prosedur kerja:
"Misalnya, seseorang majikan ingin untuk peran yang membutuhkan perhatian yang konsisten untuk
detail berulang mungkin tidak ingin memberikan pekerjaan yang dapat seseorang yang sangat kreatif dan
mudah bosan."
Angka yang membuat kontribusi yang signifikan terhadap psikometri termasuk Karl Pearson, Henry F.

Kaiser, LL Thurstone, Georg Rasch, Johnson O'Connor, Frederic M. Tuhan, Ledyard R Tucker, dan Arthur
Jensen.
Definisi pengukuran dalam ilmu sosial
Definisi pengukuran dalam ilmu sosial memiliki sejarah yang panjang. Definisi yang luas saat ini, diusulkan
oleh Stanley Smith Stevens (1946), adalah pengukuran yang adalah "penugasan angka ke obyek atau
peristiwa menurut beberapa aturan". Definisi ini diperkenalkan di koran di mana Stevens mengusulkan
empat tingkat pengukuran. Meskipun diadopsi secara luas, definisi ini berbeda dalam hal-hal penting dari
definisi yang lebih klasik pengukuran diadopsi dalam ilmu fisika, yang merupakan pengukuran yang adalah
estimasi numerik dan ekspresi besarnya satu kuantitas relatif terhadap yang lain (Michell, 1997).
Memang, definisi Stevens pengukuran dikemukakan sebagai tanggapan terhadap Inggris Ferguson Komite,
yang kursi, A. Ferguson, seorang ahli fisika. Komite diangkat pada tahun 1932 oleh Asosiasi Inggris untuk
Kemajuan Sains untuk menyelidiki kemungkinan kuantitatif memperkirakan peristiwa sensorik. Meskipun
kursi dan anggota lainnya fisikawan, panitia juga termasuk beberapa psikolog. Laporan komite menyoroti
pentingnya definisi pengukuran. Sementara respon Stevens adalah untuk mengajukan sebuah definisi baru,
yang memiliki pengaruh besar di lapangan, ini tidak berarti tanggapan hanya untuk laporan. Lain, terutama
yang berbeda, respon adalah untuk menerima definisi klasik, sebagaimana tercermin dalam pernyataan
berikut:
"Pengukuran dalam psikologi dan fisika sama sekali tidak berbeda arti Fisikawan dapat mengukur ketika
mereka dapat menemukan operasi dengan mana mereka dapat memenuhi kriteria yang diperlukan;. Psikolog
tetapi untuk melakukan hal yang sama Mereka tidak perlu khawatir tentang perbedaan misterius antara
makna. pengukuran dalam dua ilmu. " (Reese, 1943, hal 49)
Ini tanggapan yang berbeda ini tercermin dalam pendekatan alternatif untuk pengukuran. Sebagai contoh,
metode berdasarkan matriks kovariansi biasanya digunakan pada premis bahwa angka, seperti nilai baku
berasal dari penilaian, adalah pengukuran. Pendekatan tersebut memerlukan definisi implisit Stevens
pengukuran, yang hanya memerlukan bahwa jumlah ditugaskan sesuai ketentuan beberapa. Tugas penelitian
utama, kemudian, adalah umumnya dianggap penemuan asosiasi antara skor, dan faktor diketengahkan
untuk mendasari hubungan tersebut.
Di sisi lain, ketika pengukuran model seperti model Rasch bekerja, jumlahnya tidak ditetapkan berdasarkan
aturan. Sebaliknya, sesuai dengan pernyataan Reese di atas, kriteria khusus untuk pengukuran dinyatakan,
dan tujuannya adalah untuk membangun prosedur atau operasi yang menyediakan data yang memenuhi
kriteria yang relevan. Pengukuran diperkirakan berdasarkan model, dan tes dilakukan untuk memastikan
apakah kriteria yang relevan telah dipenuhi.
Instrumen dan prosedur
Instrumen psikometri pertama dirancang untuk mengukur konsep kecerdasan. Pendekatan historis paling
terkenal melibatkan tes Stanford-Binet IQ, yang dikembangkan awalnya oleh psikolog Alfred Binet
Perancis. Berlawanan dengan kesalahpahaman yang cukup luas, tidak ada bukti kuat bahwa adalah mungkin
untuk mengukur kecerdasan bawaan melalui instrumen tersebut, dalam arti kapasitas belajar bawaan tidak
terpengaruh oleh pengalaman, juga tidak niat ini asli ketika mereka dikembangkan. Namun demikian, tes
kecerdasan adalah alat yang berguna untuk berbagai tujuan. Sebuah konsepsi alternatif intelijen adalah
bahwa kapasitas kognitif dalam diri seseorang adalah manifestasi dari komponen umum, atau faktor
kecerdasan umum, serta kapasitas kognitif spesifik ke domain tertentu.
Psikometrik diterapkan secara luas dalam penilaian pendidikan untuk mengukur kemampuan dalam domain
seperti membaca, menulis, dan matematika. Pendekatan utama dalam menerapkan tes di domain ini telah
Teori Tes Klasik dan Item lebih baru Respon Teori dan model pengukuran Rasch. Pendekatan-pendekatan
yang terakhir memungkinkan skala bersama orang-orang dan item penilaian, yang menyediakan dasar untuk
pemetaan kontinum perkembangan dengan memungkinkan deskripsi keterampilan ditampilkan pada

berbagai titik di sepanjang kontinum. pendekatan tersebut memberikan informasi yang kuat mengenai sifat
pertumbuhan pembangunan dalam berbagai domain.
Fokus utama lain dalam psikometri telah di tes kepribadian. Ada berbagai pendekatan teoretis untuk
konseptualisasi dan pengukuran kepribadian. Beberapa instrumen lebih dikenal termasuk Minnesota
Multifase Personality Inventory, Model Lima Faktor (atau "Big 5") dan alat-alat seperti Kepribadian dan
Preferensi Inventarisasi dan Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Sikap juga telah dipelajari secara ekstensif
menggunakan pendekatan psikometri. Sebuah metode yang umum dalam pengukuran sikap adalah
penggunaan skala Likert. Sebuah metode alternatif melibatkan penerapan model pengukuran berlangsung,
yang paling umum menjadi hiperbolik Cosine Model (Andrich & Luo, 1993).
Pendekatan Teoritis
Psychometricians telah mengembangkan sejumlah teori pengukuran yang berbeda. Ini termasuk teori tes
klasik (CTT) dan teori respon butir (IRT) Sebuah pendekatan yang tampaknya matematis untuk menjadi
serupa dengan IRT tapi juga cukup berbeda, dalam hal asal-usulnya dan fitur, diwakili oleh model Rasch
untuk pengukuran. Pengembangan model Rasch, dan kelas yang lebih luas model mana ia berasal, secara
eksplisit didirikan pada persyaratan pengukuran dalam ilmu fisika.
Psychometricians juga telah mengembangkan metode untuk bekerja dengan matriks besar korelasi dan
covariances. Teknik dalam tradisi umum meliputi: analisis faktor, sebuah cara menentukan dimensi yang
mendasari data; skala multidimensi, metode untuk menemukan representasi sederhana untuk data dengan
sejumlah besar dimensi laten, dan data clustering, pendekatan untuk menemukan obyek yang saling
menyukai. Semua metode deskriptif multivariat mencoba untuk menyaring data dalam jumlah besar ke
dalam struktur sederhana. Baru-baru ini, pemodelan persamaan struktural dan analisis jalur merupakan
pendekatan yang lebih canggih untuk bekerja sama dengan matriks kovarians besar. Metode ini
memungkinkan model statistik yang canggih untuk dipasang ke data dan diuji untuk menentukan apakah
mereka cocok memadai.
Salah satu kekurangan utama dalam analisis berbagai faktor kurangnya konsensus dalam memotong poin
untuk menentukan jumlah faktor laten. Sebuah prosedur yang biasa adalah untuk menghentikan anjak ketika
eigenvalues turun di bawah satu karena menyusut bola asli. Kurangnya poin pemotongan keprihatinan
metode multivariat lainnya, juga.
Konsep-konsep kunci
Konsep-konsep kunci dalam teori tes klasik adalah reliabilitas dan validitas. Sebuah ukuran yang dapat
diandalkan adalah salah satu yang mengukur membangun secara konsisten di seluruh waktu, individu, dan
situasi. Ukuran yang berlaku adalah salah satu yang langkah apa yang dimaksudkan untuk mengukur.
mengukur mungkin dapat diandalkan tanpa berlaku. Namun, reliabilitas sangat diperlukan, tetapi tidak
cukup, untuk validitas.
Kedua reliabilitas dan validitas dapat dinilai secara statistik. Konsistensi atas tindakan mengulangi dari
pengujian yang sama dapat dinilai dengan koefisien korelasi Pearson, dan sering disebut-tes ulang uji
reliabilitas Demikian pula, kesetaraan versi berbeda dari ukuran yang sama dapat diindeks oleh korelasi
Pearson,. Dan disebut setara bentuk keandalan atau istilah yang serupa.
Internal konsistensi, yang membahas homogenitas bentuk tes tunggal, dapat dinilai dengan menghubungkan
kinerja pada dua bagian dari tes, yang disebut reliabilitas split-setengah, nilai korelasi momen-produk
Pearson koefisien dua tes setengah adalah disesuaikan dengan formula prediksi Spearman-Brown sesuai
dengan korelasi antara dua tes full-length. Mungkin indeks yang paling umum digunakan adalah
reliabilitas Cronbach, yang setara dengan rata-rata dari semua koefisien split-setengah mungkin. pendekatan
lainnya termasuk hubungan intra-kelas, yang merupakan rasio varians dari pengukuran target yang diberikan
kepada varians dari semua target.

Ada sejumlah bentuk yang berbeda dari validitas. Validitas Kriteria-istimewa dapat dinilai dengan
menghubungkan suatu ukuran dengan ukuran kriteria diketahui berlaku. Ketika ukuran kriteria dikumpulkan
pada waktu yang sama sebagai ukuran sedang divalidasi tujuannya adalah untuk menetapkan validitas
konkuren, ketika kriteria dikumpulkan kemudian tujuannya adalah untuk menetapkan validitas prediktif.
ukuran A memiliki validitas konstruk jika itu berhubungan dengan ukuran lain konstruksi sesuai dengan
teori. validitas Konten adalah demonstrasi bahwa item tes diambil dari domain yang diukur. Dalam contoh
seleksi personil, konten pengujian didasarkan pada pernyataan pasti atau set pernyataan pengetahuan,
keterampilan, kemampuan, atau karakteristik lain yang diperoleh dari analisis jabatan.
Item respon model teori hubungan antara sifat-sifat laten dan tanggapan untuk menguji item. Di antara
keuntungan lainnya, IRT memberikan dasar untuk memperoleh perkiraan lokasi seorang pengambil-test
pada sifat laten yang diberikan serta standar error pengukuran lokasi itu. Sebagai contoh, pengetahuan
mahasiswa tentang sejarah bisa dideduksi dari skor nya pada tes universitas dan kemudian dibandingkan
dengan andal dengan pengetahuan seorang siswa sekolah menengah dideduksi dari tes terlalu sulit. Skor
diperoleh oleh teori tes klasik tidak memiliki karakteristik, dan penilaian kemampuan aktual (daripada
kemampuan relatif terhadap pengambil test lainnya-) harus dinilai dengan membandingkan skor untuk
orang-orang "kelompok norma" yang dipilih secara acak dari populasi. Bahkan, semua tindakan berasal dari
teori tes klasik tergantung pada sampel yang diuji, sedangkan, pada prinsipnya, yang berasal dari teori
respon item tidak.
Standar kualitas
Pertimbangan validitas dan reliabilitas biasanya dipandang sebagai elemen penting untuk menentukan
kualitas tes apapun. asosiasi Namun, profesional dan praktisi sering menempatkan masalah ini dalam
konteks yang lebih luas ketika mengembangkan standar dan membuat penilaian secara keseluruhan tentang
kualitas tes secara keseluruhan dalam konteks tertentu. Sebuah pertimbangan keprihatinan di banyak
pengaturan penelitian yang digunakan adalah apakah metrik inventarisasi psikologis yang diberikan
bermakna atau sewenang-wenang.
Pengujian standar
Dalam bidang ini, Standar Pendidikan dan Psikologis Pengujian standar tempat tentang validitas dan
reliabilitas, bersama dengan kesalahan pengukuran dan pertimbangan terkait di bawah topik umum uji,
evaluasi konstruksi dan dokumentasi. Topik utama kedua meliputi standar yang berkaitan dengan keadilan
dalam pengujian, termasuk keadilan dalam menggunakan pengujian dan uji, hak dan tanggung jawab
pengambil pengujian individu dari beragam latar belakang linguistik, dan pengujian individu dengan cacat.
Topik utama ketiga dan terakhir meliputi standar yang berhubungan dengan aplikasi pengujian, termasuk
tanggung jawab pengguna pengujian psikologis dan penilaian, pengujian dan penilaian pendidikan,
pengujian dalam pekerjaan dan credentialing, ditambah pengujian dalam evaluasi program dan kebijakan
publik.
[Sunting] Standar Evaluasi
Dalam bidang evaluasi, dan evaluasi pendidikan tertentu, Komite Bersama Standar Evaluasi
Pendidikan telah menerbitkan tiga set standar untuk evaluasi. Para Personil Evaluasi Standar diterbitkan
pada tahun 1988, Program Evaluasi Standar (2nd edition) diterbitkan pada tahun 1994, dan Evaluasi
Mahasiswa Standar diterbitkan pada tahun 2003.
Setiap publikasi menyajikan dan menguraikan serangkaian standar untuk digunakan dalam berbagai
pengaturan pendidikan. Standar memberikan pedoman untuk merancang, melaksanakan, menilai dan
memperbaiki bentuk evaluasi diidentifikasi. Masing-masing standar telah ditempatkan dalam salah satu dari
empat kategori dasar untuk mempromosikan evaluasi pendidikan yang layak, berguna, layak, dan akurat.
Dalam set standar, validitas dan reliabilitas pertimbangan yang tercakup dalam topik akurasi. Sebagai
contoh, standar mahasiswa keakuratan membantu memastikan bahwa evaluasi siswa akan memberikan
informasi suara, akurat, dan kredibel tentang belajar siswa dan kinerja.
............................................

1.0 BACKGROUND AND PREMISES

1.1 Interaction Analysis1
Interaction Analysis as we describe it here is an interdisciplinary method for the empirical investigation of
the interaction of human beings with each other and with objects in their environment. It investigates human
activities such as talk, nonverbal interaction, and the use of artifacts and technologies, identifying routine
practices and problems and the resources for their solution. Its roots lie in ethnography (especially
participant observation), sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, kinesics, proxemics, and
ethology.
Video technology has been vital in establishing Interaction Analysis which depends on the technology of
audiovisual recording for its primary records and on playback capability2 for their analysis. Only electronic
recording produces the kind of data corpus that allows the close interrogation required for Interaction
Analysis. In particular, it provides the crucial ability to replay a sequence of interaction repeatedly for
multiple viewers, and on multiple occasions.
Interaction Analysis as a distinct method is just beginning to be differentiated from other kinds of videobased analyses. It is not taught per se in any university curriculum; however, there is a growing number of
practitioners doing video-based Interaction-Analytic work who contribute methods, approaches, and
findings to the practices of an emerging community of practitioners of Interaction Analysis. In this paper we
describe the work of researchers loosely associated in one way or another with two laboratories dedicated to
Interaction Analysis: the first operated at Michigan State University (MSU) between 1975 and 1988; the
second functions as a joint venture between Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and the Institute for Research
on Learning (IRL) in Palo Alto, California. While the MSU Interaction Analysis Laboratory often focused
on medical settings, the Palo Alto group is particularly concerned with the study of human-machine
interaction, collaborative design practice, and the situated nature of skill and knowledge acquisition3. Both
laboratories have had on-going work groups and a policy of encouraging participation by researchers
seeking to learn about Interaction Analysis.
1.2 Framing Assumptions
No method is without theoretical assumptions. Methods, far from being neutral tools, promote both concrete
working practices and theoretical ideas. Practitioners of Interaction Analysis, though they come from many
different disciplines and use the results of their analyses for many different purposes, also share a more or
less explicit view of the world that is displayed and reinforced by the work of doing this kind of analysis.
Furthermore, they hold a common set of ideas about how to gain access to that world, i.e. what are possible
"ways into" the phenomena of interest. A clear formulation of these framing assumptions does not yet exist,
and there is likely to be some disagreement about which assumptions are more or less fundamental.
Nevertheless, we believe it is important to begin to make the theoretical grounding of our work explicit. The
following comments are offered in the hope of stimulating increasing clarity as Interaction Analysis emerges
as a coherent way of doing analytic work.
One basic underlying assumption in Interaction Analysis is that knowledge and action are fundamentally
social in origin, organization, and use, and are situated in particular social and material ecologies. Thus,
expert knowledge and practice are seen not so much as located in the heads of individuals but as situated in
the interactions between members of a particular community engaged with the material world. Seeing
cognition as socially and ecologically distributed has methodological consequences: Interaction Analysis
finds its basic data for theorizing about knowledge and practice not in traces of cranial activity (for example,
protocol or survey interview data), but in the details of social interactions in time and space, and particularly
in the naturally occurring, everyday interactions between members of communities of practice4. On this
view, artifacts and technologies set up a social field within which certain activities become very likely,
others possible, and still others very improbable or impossible. The goal of Interaction Analysis, then, is to
identify regularities in the ways in which participants utilize the resources of the complex social and material
world of actors and objects within which they operate.
Another widely shared assumption among practitioners of Interaction Analysis is that verifiable observation
provides the best foundation for analytic knowledge of the world. This view implies a commitment to
grounding theories of knowledge and action in empirical evidence, that is, to building generalizations from
records of particular, naturally occurring activities, and steadfastly holding our theories accountable to that
evidence. Underlying this attitude is the assumption that the world is accessible ansensible not only to
participants in daily human interaction but also to analysts when they observe such interaction on videotape.

Analytic work, then, draws, at least in part, on our experience and expertise as competent members of
ongoing social systems and functioning communities of practice.
While not yet well articulated, the domain of questions of interest to Interaction Analysis revolves around
the achievement of social order (and ordering) in everyday settings. A set of "analytic foci" (see section 6) is
emerging that begins to specify the domain of questions that Interaction Analysis asks of the world
represented on tape. Predominant among these are questions having to do with how people make sense of
each others' actions as meaningful, orderly, and projectable.5 Since locally sensible interaction is seen as the
collaborative achievement of participants, our work as analysts lies precisely in specifying the ways in
which participants make this orderliness and projectability apparent to each other and incidentally to us, the
analysts. We look for the mechanisms through which participants assemble and employ the social and
material resources inherent in their situations for getting their mutual dealings done.
As we apply Interaction Analysis to learning processes, these same kinds of framing assumptions remain
relevant. Interaction-Analytic studies see learning as a distributed, ongoing social process, where evidence
that learning is occurring or has occurred must be found in understanding the ways in which people
collaboratively do learning and do recognizing learning as having occurred (Garfinkel, 1967). The following
sections are devoted to explicating these notions.
.............................
What is Discourse Analysis?
Discourse can be defined in three ways:

Language beyond the level of a sentence

Language behaviours linked to social practices

Language as a system of thought

Discourse Analysis (DA) is a modern discipline of the social sciences that covers a wide variety of
different sociolinguistic approaches. It aims to study and analyse the use of discourse in at least one of the
three ways stated above, and more often than not, all of them at once. Analysis of discourse looks not only at
the basic level of what is said, but takes into consideration the surrounding social and historical contexts. As
Sam Kirkham mentions in the video below, making the distinction between whether a person is described as
a terrorist or a freedom fighter is something DA would look at, whilst considering the implications of
each term. To expand, 'terrorist' is a term that brings negative connotations of evil and violence, whereas
'freedom fighter' has positive connotations of fighting towards political upheaval of dictatorships. So, one
term is looked upon a lot more favourably than the other, and this is what a Discourse Analyst would
consider, as well as looking at the relationship of these terms with a widely used term such as Muslim.
Discourse analysts will look at any given text, and this just means anything that communicates a message,
and particularly, how that message constructs a social reality or view of the world.
A sub-discipline of DA is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and this looks at discourse from a politically
motivated level. An analyst in this field will identify a topic for analysis, and then collect a corpus of texts,
before finally analysing it to identify how language is used to reproduce ideologies in the text. A corpus is
large, structured electronic database of texts, often used in linguistics. Using a corpus isn't the only method
of analysis in CDA, as any method which provides an insight into ideology in discourse is accepted by
researchers. CDA will look at the different levels of a text; the macro, meso and micro levels, but this is
discussed more in depth in the Example Research section.
................................................................
Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyze
written, vocal, or sign language use, or any significant semioticevent.
The objects of discourse analysisdiscourse, writing, conversation, communicativeeventare variously
defined in terms of coherent sequences of sentences,propositions, speech, or turns-at-talk. Contrary to much
of traditional linguistics, discourse analysts not only study language use 'beyond the sentence boundary', but
also prefer to analyze 'naturally occurring' language use, and not invented examples.Text linguistics is a
closely related field. The essential difference between discourse analysis and text linguistics is that discourse
analysis aims at revealing socio-psychological characteristics of a person/persons rather than text structure.[1]

Discourse analysis has been taken up in a variety of social science disciplines, including linguistics,
education, sociology, anthropology, social work, cognitive psychology, social psychology, area
studies, cultural studies, international relations,human geography, communication studies, and translation
studies, each of which is subject to its own assumptions, dimensions of analysis, and methodologies.
......................................
Topics of interest[edit]
Topics of discourse analysis include:[citation needed]
The various levels or dimensions of discourse, such as sounds (intonation, etc.), gestures, syntax,
the lexicon, style,rhetoric, meanings, speech acts, moves, strategies, turns, and other aspects
of interaction
Genres of discourse (various types of discourse in politics, the media, education, science, business,
etc.)
The relations between discourse and the emergence of syntactic structure
The relations between text (discourse) and context
The relations between discourse and power
The relations between discourse and interaction
The relations between discourse and cognition and memory
Political discourse[edit]
Political discourse analysis is a field of discourse analysis which focuses on discourse in political forums
(such as debates, speeches, and hearings) as the phenomenon of interest. Policy analysis requires discourse
analysis to be effective from thepost-positivist perspective.
Political discourse is the informal exchange of reasoned views as to which of several alternative courses of
action should be taken to solve a societal problem.[2]
History[edit]
The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the United States an
not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article and discuss
issue on the talk page. (December 2010)
Although the ancient Greeks (among others) had much to say on discourse, some scholars[which?] consider the
Austrian emigre Leo Spitzer's Stilstudien [Style Studies] of 1928 the earliest example of discourse
analysis (DA). It was translated into French by Michel Foucault.
However, the term first came into general use following the publication of a series of papers by Zellig
Harris beginning in 1952 and reporting on work from which he developed transformational grammar in the
late 1930s. Formal equivalence relations among the sentences of a coherent discourse are made explicit by
using sentence transformations to put the text in a canonical form. Words and sentences with equivalent
information then appear in the same column of an array. This work progressed over the next four decades
(see references) into a science of sublanguage analysis (Kittredge & Lehrberger 1982), culminating in a
demonstration of the informational structures in texts of a sublanguage of science, that of immunology,
(Harris et al. 1989) and a fully articulated theory of linguistic informational content (Harris 1991). During
this time, however, most linguists ignored these developments in favor of a succession of elaborate theories
of sentence-level syntax and semantics.[3]
In January, 1953, a linguist working for the American Bible Society, James A. Lauriault/Loriot, needed to
find answers to some fundamental errors in translating Quechua, in the Cuzco area of Peru. Following
Harris's 1952 publications, he worked over the meaning and placement of each word in a collection of
Quechua legends with a native speaker of Quechua and was able to formulate discourse rules that
transcended the simple sentence structure. He then applied the process to Shipibo, another language of
Eastern Peru. He taught the theory at the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Norman, Oklahoma, in the
summers of 1956 and 1957 and entered the University of Pennsylvania to study with Harris in the interim
year. He tried to publish a paper Shipibo Paragraph Structure, but it was delayed until 1970 (Loriot &
Hollenbach 1970).[citation needed] In the meantime, Dr. Kenneth Lee Pike, a professor at University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, taught the theory, and one of his students, Robert E. Longacre developed it in his writings.
Harris's methodology disclosing the correlation of form with meaning was developed into a system for the
computer-aided analysis of natural language by a team led by Naomi Sager at NYU, which has been applied
to a number of sublanguage domains, most notably to medical informatics. The software for the Medical
Language Processor is publicly available onSourceForge.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, and without reference to this prior work, a variety of other approaches to a new
cross-discipline of DA began to develop in most of the humanities and social sciences concurrently with,
and related to, other disciplines, such as semiotics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics. Many
of these approaches, especially those influenced by the social sciences, favor a more dynamic study of oral
talk-in-interaction. An example is "conversational analysis", which was influenced by the Sociologist Harold
Garfinkel, the founder of Ethnomethodology.
In Europe, Michel Foucault became one of the key theorists of the subject, especially of discourse, and
wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge. In this context, the term 'discourse' no longer refers to formal
linguistic aspects, but to institutionalized patterns of knowledge that become manifest in disciplinary
structures and operate by the connection of knowledge and power. Since the 1970s, Foucaults works have
had an increasing impact especially on discourse analysis in the social sciences. Thus, in modern European
social sciences, one can find a wide range of different approaches working with Foucaults definition of
discourse and his theoretical concepts. Apart from the original context in France, there is, at least since 2005,
a broad discussion on socio-scientific discourse analysis in Germany. Here, for example,
thesociologist Reiner Keller developed his widely recognized 'Sociology of Knowledge Approach to
Discourse (SKAD)'.[4]Following the sociology of knowledge by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann,
Keller argues, that our sense of reality in everyday life and thus the meaning of every objects, actions and
events are the product of a permanent, routinized interaction. In this context, SKAD has been developed as a
scientific perspective that is able to understand the processes of 'The Social Construction of Reality' on all
levels of social life by combining Michel Foucault's theories of discourse and power with the theory of
knowledge by Berger/Luckmann. Whereas the latter primarily focus on the constitution and stabilisation of
knowledge on the level of interaction, Foucault's perspective concentrates on institutional contexts of the
production and integration of knowledge, where the subject mainly appears to be determined by knowledge
and power. Therefore, the 'Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse' can also be seen as an approach
to deal with the vividly discussed micro-macro problem in sociology.
Perspectives[edit]
The following are some of the specific theoretical perspectives and analytical approaches used in linguistic
discourse analysis:
Applied linguistics
Cognitive neuroscience of discourse comprehension[5][6]
Cognitive psychology, studying the production and comprehension of discourse.
Conversation analysis
Critical discourse analysis
Discursive psychology
Emergent grammar
Ethnography of communication
Functional grammar
Interactional sociolinguistics
Mediated Stylistics
Pragmatics
Response based therapy (counselling)
Rhetoric
Stylistics (linguistics)
Sublanguage analysis
Tagmemics
Text linguistics
Variation analysis
Although these approaches emphasize different aspects of language use, they all view language as social
interaction, and are concerned with the social contexts in which discourse is embedded.
Often a distinction is made between 'local' structures of discourse (such as relations among sentences,
propositions, and turns) and 'global' structures, such as overall topics and the schematic organization of
discourses and conversations. For instance, many types of discourse begin with some kind of global
'summary', in titles, headlines, leads, abstracts, and so on.

A problem for the discourse analyst is to decide when a particular feature is relevant to the specification is
required. Are there general principles which will determine the relevance or nature of the specification.[7]
.................................................
Defining Ethnography and Culture
This chapter is dedicated to ethnographic research. Ethnography is the study of cultures through close
observation, reading, and interpretation. Ethnographic researchers work in the field, in the culture which
they are studying. The activities they conduct are also often called fieldwork. Ethnographic researchers learn
how to recognize traits that make up a culture and how to describe it to others. As a research method,
ethnography is used in many disciplines, among them anthropology, political and social studies, education,
and others. Because ethnography is the study of cultures, before going any further, it is important to define
the word culture.
Exploration Activity: Defining Culture
Working in a small group or with the rest of the class, brainstorm a list of definitions of the word culture.
Keep in mind that to ethnographers, this term encompasses much more than the high culture of museums,
concert halls, and libraries.
After completing your list, share your definitions with your classmates. Also, compare your lists with the
definitions offered by expert-ethnographers below.
As you worked on this activity, you probably noticed that the word culture is rather difficult to define. In his
1985 work Mirror for Man: The Relation of Anthropology to Modern Life, anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn
offers the following definitions of culture.
1. The total way of life of a people
2. The social legacy the individual acquires from his group
3. A way of thinking, feeling, and believing
4. An abstraction from behavior
5. A theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which a group of people in fact behave
6. A storehouse of pooled learning
7. Learned behavior
8. A set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other men
9. A behavioral map, sieve, or matrix
In his 1973 text The Interpretation of Cultures, another prominent anthropologist and ethnographer Clifford
Geertz wrote that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun I take culture
to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an
interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after. . . .. (4-5).
There are several important terms in both Kluckhohns and Geertzs definitions of culture that would help us
better understand the purposes, nature, and methods of ethnographic research. Firstly, all the definitions of
culture speak of is a social phenomenon. Kluckhohn calls is a total way of life of a people and a
storehouse of pooled learning. Presumably the learning is pooled from all the members of a given society
or culture. Geertz talks of humans as being suspended in webs of significance, not independent but tied to
their environments. Secondly, cultures are distinguished by patterns that repeat themselves. These parents
can be noticed, studied, and explained. The job on an ethnographer is to find, record, and interpret such
parents.
Notice that the definitions of the word culture offered above encompass the complete scope of human
activity. Culture is not just the behavior and habits of high society, or of cultured people. It is not only
the ability to appreciate art, music, and fine literature, although people who can do that also belong to
particular cultures, and those cultures can be studied by ethnographers.
Ethnographers define the word culture in broader terms, as a patterned behavior or way of life of a group
of people. Some of the elements of culture then are the common habits, customs, traditions, histories, and
geographieseverything that connect the members of the culture together and defines them. In his 1958
essay Culture is Ordinary, author Raymond Williams developed a definition of what he called ordinary

culture.
Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own
meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a
society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment
under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land. The growing
society is there, yet it is also made and remade in every individual mind. The making of a mind is, first, the
slow learning of shapes, purposes, and meanings, so that work, observation and communication are possible.
Then, second, but equal in importance, is the testing of these in experience, the making of new observations,
comparisons, and meanings. A culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its
members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested. These are the
ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture:
that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both the most ordinary common meanings and the
finest individual meanings. We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life--the
common meanings; to mean the arts and learning--the special processes of discovery and creative effort.
Some writers reserve the word for one or other of these senses; I insist on both, and on the significance of
their conjunction. The questions I ask about our culture are questions about deep personal meanings. Culture
is ordinary, in every society and in every mind. (6).
Williams definition of culture confirms what we have already seen---that the most important and interesting
elements of a culture for an ethnographer are patterns of behavior and function of the people who comprise
the culture under investigation. According to Williams, the ordinary processes of human societies taken,
studied, and explained in their totality give us an understanding of a given culture.
Exploration Activity: Subcultures To Which You Belong.
Working either on your own or with a partner make a list of subcultures to which you belong. Because the
scope of ethnographic research includes both high and ordinary cultures, include both types in your list.
It may be useful to begin this activity by thinking about the groups and communities, both formal and
informal, to which you belong. Consider such factors as national and cultural, and local origin, ethnicity,
language and dialect, social class, interests and hobbies, profession, family status and values, and so on.
Share the results of your brainstorming with the rest of the class.
Ethnographic Research is Qualitative
As a writer of school research papers, you may be used to conducting quantitative research. Quantitative
research seeks to obtain data which are applicable to large populations, and a broad spectrum of projects and
situations, It also often seeks to obtain results that can be repeated in other situations.
For example, researchers deciding to conduct a national poll designed to predict the results of a presidential
election, they will use statistical methods to come up with numbers and other data capable of predicting the
election results nationwide. Quantitative research seeks to create sets of data which can be used to explain
and interpret large-scale phenomena and patterns and which does that through numbers or some other
quantifiable means.
By contrast, qualitative research has a different purpose. As its name suggests, qualitative research is
interested in conducting in-depth studies of smaller populations and groups. They do not seek to obtain data
that can be applied across the board, instead trying to find out as much as possible about a smaller sample or
a smaller phenomenon. Qualitative researchers do not use statistics. Instead, they observe, conduct
interviews and surveys.
Ethnographic research is qualitative. Ethnographers do not apply the results of their studies of one particular
culture to other cultures. They do not apply statistical methods of quantification to the results of their
research. They are more interested in descriptions than in statistics.

Why is it important to understand the difference between these two kinds of research? There are at least two
reasons. Firstly, writers who are used to producing traditional research papers with their almost-universal
insistence on objectivity and broad applicability of results may wonder about the reliability of qualitative
research. After all, they may think, what good is a research methods, if it does not allow us to apply the
results of research to other situations and other populations, and if it cannot be replicated? This is a matter of
purpose with which research is conducted. If, for example, as in the instance described earlier, the purpose
of a research project is to find out what the population of a whole country thinks about an issue, then
quantitative research methods will work well. If, on the other hand, the purpose of the researcher is to
conduct an in-depth study of a culture, qualitative research will suite than purpose better. Secondly,
beginning ethnographers need to understand that, when conducting ethnographic research, it is often more
important to go for depth than for breadth in their investigation. They need not worry that their results would
not be applicable to other cultures and other research situations because they do not have to be. The goal of
an ethnographer is to create a deep and credible snapshot of a culture that he or she is studying. The results
of this investigation may inform and be cited by other researchers, but it will not be directly applicable to
other cultures and other research projects.
Ethnographic Research is Subjective
One of the main tasks of an ethnographer is to learn to discern the unusual in the usual. Experienced
ethnographers realize that what seems mundane and ordinary to them many look strange and unusual to
others. According to ethnographers Bonnie Sunstein and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater, when someone says
thats really weird or arent they strange, a fieldworker hears these comments as signals for
investigation. (2001, 6).
If this is the case, then the interpretation of a culture is necessarily biased and subjective. When we step into
a new culture, we bring with us our previous experiences, preconceptions, and ideas. An objective
observation devoid of the observers pre-existing attitudes, is simply impossible. But that is not a problem
for ethnographers. Instead, it is an opportunity because ethnographers benefit from being involved with the
cultures they are studying. They know those cultures well and are therefore able to convey their meanings to
others. Being an insider of a culture, a participant-observer often allows ethnographers to uncover hidden
meanings that are not immediately visible or accessible to outsiders.
Consider the following example. In his 1977 work entitled Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,
Geertz describes how, while studying cock fighting in Bali, the author and his wife had to escape a police
raid at one of the cock fighting rings. Geertz writes,
"On the established anthropological principle, When in Rome, my wife and I decided, only slightly less
instantaneously than everyone else, that the thing to do was run too. We ran down the main street. About
halfway down another fugitive ducked suddenly into a compoundhis own, it turned outand we, seeing
nothing ahead of us but rice fields, open country, and a very high volcano, followed him. As the three of us
came tumbling into the courtyard, his wife, who had apparently been through this sort of thing before,
whipped out a table, a tablecloth, three chairs, and three cups of tea, and we all, without any explicit
communication whatsoever, sat down, commenced to sip tea, and sought to compose ourselves (307)."
The remarkable feature of this passage is the presence of the researcher in the midst of the events he is
studying and his ability to write about the events from not from the point of view of a detached observer, but
as a participant. Geertz and his wife go to see an outlawed cockfight, are chased by police, and end up in a
locals backyard sipping tea and pretending that they had not broken the law. It is true that, as a European
researcher, Geertz is not writing about a culture that is his. At the same time, having participated in the
same activities as the Balinese whom he came to observe regularly partake in, he began to gain the status of
an insider. That status, in turn, gave him larger access to the culture and more authority to write about it.
The ethnographer is always present in the research he or she conducts and the texts he or she creates. It is
not only normal but also customary and necessary for ethnographers to write themselves into their texts by
providing narratives and descriptions of their own role in the project and of their reactions to the cultures

which they observe and try to understand. In his 1988 book Works and Lives: The Ethnographer as Author,
Clifford Geertz explains:
"The ability of anthropologists to get us to take what they say seriously has less to do with either a factual
look or an air of conceptual elegance than it has with their capacity to convince us that what they say is a
result of their having actually penetrated (or, if you prefer, been penetrated by) another form of life, one way
or another, truly been there. And that, persuading us that the offstage miracle has occurred, is where the
writing comes in (4-5)."
Ethnography is then a rhetorical act, and the ethnographer must not only collect credible research data, but
also write about them credibly and persuasively.
Learning to Ask Ethnographic Questions
It is important for every researcher to learn to ask the kinds of research questions that will help him or her
succeed in the research project. Ethnographic research is no exception. Ethnographic research questions
must be such that will enable you to not only observe the culture you are studying, but also to discern and
understand the patterns of behavior and function in that culture. In other words, it is not sufficient for an
ethnographer to record what he or she sees. In addition, ethnographic researcher must construct the research
questions which would allow him or her to explain or interpret the culture he or she is studying.
Ethnographic questions, are different from those asked by new media reporters who are sent to the scene of
an event to observe and record it. According to Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater:
An ethnographer and a journalist may both gather information about the same event but write up their
accounts very differently. A standard daily newspaper reporter, for example, conducts research in an attempt
to be objective: to give the who, what, where, when, and why of an event for a readership that expects facts
without too much interpretation. As a fieldworker, your purpose is to collect and consider multiple sources
of information, not facts alone, to convey the perspective of the people about the culture you study (1997,
13-14)."
As an ethnographer, you are, of course, interested not only in the facts but also in what those facts mean and
how they might help you to explain the culture you are studying. Therefore, you will need to create the kinds
of research questions which would answer not only what is happening in front of your eyes but also why it is
happening and what its significance is for the culture you are investigating. You also need to ask the kinds of
questions that would help you discern patterns in the events or behaviors you observe, you make
connections between people, incidents, and events.
In order to create such questions, consider the following guidelines:
o Once you have observed and recorded the facts pertaining to your culture, consider using methods
other than observation. You may, for instance collect artifacts that would help you explain what you
saw. Or, you may decide to conduct interviews with the participants of the events you have been
observing.
o Ask yourself what the events or behaviors you have observed means for the culture. What is their
significance for the members of the culture and how it might be different from you or your readers
ascribe to these events. If there is such a difference, what would you do as a researcher and a writer
to explain the events or behavior to outsiders?
o Ask yourself about your subjective responses and reactions to what you are observing. How do your
existing experiences, ideas, biases, and cultural affiliations contribute to your understanding of the
culture you are studying?
Ethnographic Research Methods
Observing

Throughout this chapter, I have mentioned the word observation many times. Indeed, observing the
culture is an excellent method of studying it. Observation is one of the main research methods available to
ethnographers. The way in which you plan and conduct your ethnographic observation is determined by
your overall goals as an ethnographer, which is not only to notice interesting features of the culture you are
studying, but also to discern patterns among those events and to explain those patterns and their significance
to your readers. In planning and conducting your observations, follow the following guidelines:
o Ask for permission to observe. Your research subjects must be aware of the fact that they are being
observed. Not only is this a sound practice or ethical research, but it will also help you later on to
approach the members of the culture you are studying with interview and survey requests, if you
need them.
o Let your subjects know that you are there, and then be as unobtrusive as possible. If you need to talk
to any of the members of the culture you are studying, you can ask for an interview later.
o Keep careful notes. Record events, language and other interactions between the people you are
observing as well as their surroundings.
As I mentioned before, it is important to realize that, while observing, you may or may not be able to detach
yourself completely from the events or people around you. As you saw in the except from Clifford Geertzs
study of Balinese cock-fighting which I quoted above, ethnographers often become willing or unwilling
participants in the cultures they study. While something as dramatic as what happened to Geertz in the
passage I have quoted earlier, may not happen to you during your research, if you become an unwilling (or
willing) participant of the events, know that this is a part of being an ethnographer.
Interviewing
In addition to observing the cultures they study, ethnographers conduct interviews with the members of that
culture. Interviewing your research subjects allows you to obtain an in-depth perspective of their culture that
is hardly possible through observation alone. If you consider interviewing someone for your ethnographic
project, keep in mind the following considerations:
In designing the interview, always keep your purpose in mind. As author Ben Rafoth (2001) reminds us,
The first step in getting someone to tell you something you are interested in hearing is to tell them exactly
why you want to interview them. When you explain a clear purpose, the purpose you are interviewing
understands what they need to talk about to satisfy you. Without this sense of purpose, they dont know
whether you want to hear facts, stories, advice, complaints, or whatever (83). In other words, it is not good
enough to begin the interview with someone only with a vague idea about what you are interested in. If you
go into an interview without a clear purpose, both you are your interviewee are likely to leave the session
dissatisfied, frustrated, and wondering why you had wasted time on the interview at all.
Next, allow plenty of time for contacting the person who interests you and scheduling the meeting. People
who have interesting things to say usually have busy schedules and cannot be expected to give interviews on
a short notice. Sometimes, you may be able to squeeze a short interview in during your ethnographic
observation session, but if you want a longer, more structured interview session with someone, plan ahead
and contact them with the interview request sooner rather than later.
It is also important to resent yourself as a friendly, interested, and enthusiastic interlocutor. If you arrive at
the interview disinterested, distracted, and unorganized, your interviewee may wonder whether you really
need the interview and whether he or she should waste time with you.
Whenever possible, learn as much background information about the subject of your interview as possible.
Of course, when interviewing someone, you are looking for new knowledge, and one of the reasons why you
have asked this person for an interview is because he or she has the information or opinions that you dont
have. At the same time, remember that every interview is a conversation, and it helps if both sides at least
have the common knowledge of the basics of the subject of this conversation.
Design and ask the right questions. When interviewing someone, it is generally better to have more open-

ended questions. An open-ended question is one that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no.
Remembers that successful interviewers encourage their interlocutors to speaks as much as possible, and
open-ended questions help them achieve that goal.Rafoth cites writer Robert Weiss recommends that
interviewers allow their subjects to develop their answers in such a way that gives the interview additional
depth. Here are some of Weisss suggestions designed to help interviewers help their subjects develop their
answers further.
o Extending questions: What led to that? How did that start?
o Filling in detail: Could you walk me through the event?
o Identifying key actors and agents: Who else was involved?
o Inner events, How did that make you feel? (Rafoth 83)
If the interview is taking an unexpected, but interesting direction, allow your interviewee to lead you. You
cannot always predict what interesting or useful information your interlocutor may want to share with you
during the interview. While it is important to keep in mind the your interviews overall purpose and try to
accomplish it, allowing your subject to tell you something unplanned for will probably make the result
deeper and more interesting.
Collecting and Reading Cultural Artifacts
Another research technique designed to help ethnographers study cultures is the collection of artifacts
(objects) that might help them understand that culture and explain it to their readers. In deciding which
artifacts to collect and what to do with them, you should, first of all, be guided by the idea that artifacts are
texts that can and should be read together with other research data. The meaning of cultural artifacts within
the culture which you are studying contributes to the meaning of the culture overall. As Bonnie Sunstein and
Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater (1007) argue,
Objects, then, are readable texts. As you read an object, your position as researcher affects your reading just
as it affects the way you read a field site. You can investigate the surface details of an object, research its
history, or learn about peoples rules and rituals for using and making the object. Researchersfolklorists
and anthropologistsuse the term material culture to refer to those objects, personal artifacts loaded with
meanings and history that people mark as special: tools, musical instruments, foods, toys, jewelry,
ceremonial objects, and clothes (78).
A successful ethnographic researchers, then, would not just collect these objects and describe them in the
project, but also try to figure out what the mean for the people of the culture he or she is trying to understand
and how that meaning may help them shape their texts that they offer to the readers. Because objects are
texts, they hardly possess meanings of their own. Your task as a researcher is to make that meaning by
actively reading an artifact.
As you think about collecting cultural artifacts for your ethnographic projects, consider the following
guidelines:
o While observing a culture and talking to its members, pay attention to the items around you and to
what the people in the culture do with those items. Pay attention to the items that seem important,
useful, or indispensable to the members of the culture.
o Begin by noticing the appearance, size, texture, and other visible qualities of the artifact.
o Talk to the members of the culture you are studying to learn about the artifacts purpose, history,
peculiar features, and so on.
o Notice ways in which the artifact is being used by the members of the culture
o Compare your observations of the object with the descriptions and remarks you hear from the
members of the culture
o Think about the artifact metaphorically or symbolically. Behind its physical reality, what can the
artifact symbolize or stand for in the culture that you are studying? Thinking about artifacts in this
way will help you to go beyond simply describing them and into making conclusions and
generalizations about the artifacts meaning for the culture you are studying.
Conducting Secondary Research

Such primary research methods as interviewing, observing, and reading of cultural artifacts are central to
ethnography. It may be tempting to think of ethnography depends exclusively on primary sources and
methods. That is not the case, however, as ethnographers usually use a variety of secondary sources, both
print and electronic ones, in their work.
Using secondary sources allows you to add texture to your work. Secondary research helps ethnographers to
broaden their work by explaining the cultures they study in larger historical, geographical, and political
contexts. Studying a culture through observations and interviews is an interesting and useful endeavor
capable of teaching you and your readers a lot. But, like any writing that neglects secondary sources, such
research provides you only with one perspective of your subject. Throughout this book, I have been arguing
about the importance of research for all writing, and writing based on ethnographic research is no exception.
Adding secondary research to your primary source investigation will allow both you and your readers to
gains another perspective about your subject. Consider using the following type of secondary research
sources for your ethnographic projects:
o Any theoretical, historical, or cultural studies devoted to the subject of your investigation.
o Any studies of the cultural artifacts that you have collected as a part of your project.
o Other ethnographic accounts of the culture you are studying.
o Texts produced by the culture you are studying. Sources of this type will particularly help you to
understand the discourse of the culture you are studying.
o These sources can be of many types: books, journal and magazine articles, websites, and so on.
Of course, all sources, both primary and secondary, will have to be properly cited and documented in your
text.
......................................
Qualitative Approaches
A qualitative "approach" is a general way of thinking about conducting qualitative research. It describes,
either explicitly or implicitly, the purpose of the qualitative research, the role of the researcher(s), the stages
of research, and the method of data analysis. here, four of the major qualitative approaches are introduced.
Ethnography
The ethnographic approach to qualitative research comes largely from the field of anthropology. The
emphasis in ethnography is on studying an entire culture. Originally, the idea of a culture was tied to the
notion of ethnicity and geographic location (e.g., the culture of the Trobriand Islands), but it has been
broadened to include virtually any group or organization. That is, we can study the "culture" of a business or
defined group (e.g., a Rotary club).
Ethnography is an extremely broad area with a great variety of practitioners and methods. However, the
most common ethnographic approach is participant observation as a part of field research. The ethnographer
becomes immersed in the culture as an active participant and records extensive field notes. As in grounded
theory, there is no preset limiting of what will be observed and no real ending point in an ethnographic study.
Phenomenology
Phenomenology is sometimes considered a philosophical perspective as well as an approach to qualitative
methodology. It has a long history in several social research disciplines including psychology, sociology and
social work. Phenomenology is a school of thought that emphasizes a focus on people's subjective
experiences and interpretations of the world. That is, the phenomenologist wants to understand how the
world appears to others.
Field Research
Field research can also be considered either a broad approach to qualitative research or a method of
gathering qualitative data. the essential idea is that the researcher goes "into the field" to observe the
phenomenon in its natural state or in situ. As such, it is probably most related to the method of participant
observation. The field researcher typically takes extensive field notes which are subsequently coded and
analyzed in a variety of ways.
Grounded Theory
Grounded theory is a qualitative research approach that was originally developed by Glaser and Strauss in
the 1960s. The self-defined purpose of grounded theory is to develop theory about phenomena of interest.
But this is not just abstract theorizing they're talking about. Instead the theory needs to be grounded or
rooted in observation -- hence the term.

Grounded theory is a complex iterative process. The research begins with the raising of generative
questionswhich help to guide the research but are not intended to be either static or confining. As the
researcher begins to gather data, core theoretical concept(s) are identified. Tentative linkages are developed
between the theoretical core concepts and the data. This early phase of the research tends to be very open
and can take months. Later on the researcher is more engaged in verification and summary. The effort tends
to evolve toward one core category that is central.
There are several key analytic strategies:
Coding is a process for both categorizing qualitative data and for describing the implications and
details of these categories. Initially one does open coding, considering the data in minute detail while
developing some initial categories. Later, one moves to more selective coding where one
systematically codes with respect to a core concept.
Memoing is a process for recording the thoughts and ideas of the researcher as they evolve
throughout the study. You might think of memoing as extensive marginal notes and comments.
Again, early in the process these memos tend to be very open while later on they tend to increasingly
focus in on the core concept.
Integrative diagrams and sessions are used to pull all of the detail together, to help make sense of the
data with respect to the emerging theory. The diagrams can be any form of graphic that is useful at
that point in theory development. They might be concept maps or directed graphs or even simple
cartoons that can act as summarizing devices. This integrative work is best done in group sessions
where different members of the research team are able to interact and share ideas to increase insight.
Eventually one approaches conceptually dense theory as new observation leads to new linkages which lead
to revisions in the theory and more data collection. The core concept or category is identified and fleshed out
in detail.
When does this process end? One answer is: never! Clearly, the process described above could continue
indefinitely. Grounded theory doesn't have a clearly demarcated point for ending a study. Essentially, the
project ends when the researcher decides to quit.
What do you have when you're finished? Presumably you have an extremely well-considered explanation for
some phenomenon of interest -- the grounded theory. This theory can be explained in words and is usually
presented with much of the contextually relevant detail collected.